[Talk-in] Time for consensus

[प्रवीण नळे]

I was reading up
Highway_tag_usage<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Highway_tag_usage>and
its talk
page <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Talk:Highway_tag_usage> and
there seems to be similar confusion everywhere! Whatever tagging we agree
upon, it will be good if all the values associated with highway key gets
used so that we have as much fine-grained classification as possible. If
just number of lanes is used, we might end up with most of the roads with
value corresponding to 2 - as most of the roads in India have just 2 lanes!
In the initial recommendations that I proposed - traffic rather than number
of lanes determined the importance of road - assuming higher traffic will
most probably have more lanes and if roads were of same width, the one with
higher traffic is visible at lower zoom. I mapped
Nagpur<http://www.informationfreeway.org/?lat=21.130063762378235&lon=79.07882352766075&zoom=14&layers=B0000F000F>recently
based on those initial tagging criteria and I feel it presents good
navigation information to a motorist for route planning. A person just
passing through the city will not have to look at the map at very high zoom
levels - s/he can wade through by looking at much lesser details. On the
other hand, if tagging is done just based on number of lanes - its hard to
distinguish between the roads (point made in above talk page link as well) -
to see a live example look at west
Bangalore<http://www.informationfreeway.org/?lat=12.94623218097876&lon=77.57861070638789&zoom=13&layers=B0000F000F>.
Roads nearby are all marked as secondary (it was done before the India
tagging page existed) and they don't even get rendered properly, even
merging into each other, if too close.

As Mikel suggested, since the information is already available as either
number of lanes or width - its upto rendering engine how to present that
information - and we can provide suggestions in that forum (how about
different shades of same color - lighter the shade lesser the number of
lanes?).

-Praveen.

ps - Hi everyone! Sorry for being late to the party, wasn't aware of this
list :)
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